http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
ABRAHAM Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, is a friend of mine. I applauded him in this column when he accused Sen. Joseph Lieberman of trying to turn his vice-presidential campaign into a religious test for public office. But Foxman -- in a letter printed in the March 23 edition of The New York Times -- is sounding like all too many college students across the land who cry "racism" and "bigotry" when an article in a college paper offends them.

Foxman's letter was about the controversial advertisement that conservative David Horowitz tried to place in a large number of college newspapers. The headline of the advertisement read "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too."

As of this writing, 32 college papers have refused to run the ad, and three of the few papers that published it have abjectly apologized. A Brown University newspaper did print the Horowitz ad, and Foxman accuses the paper of complicity in Horowitz's alleged act of "fomenting racism and hate."

First, although the ad offended many students, there is as yet no constitutional amendment protecting Americans from being offended. Second, the ad is neither bigoted nor racist. It's part of a continuing debate. And to call Horowitz a racist is to cheapen the word and diminish its moral clout. Horowitz himself cheapens the word by describing the argument for reparations as "racist."

In criticizing the Brown student newspaper, Abraham Foxman ignores the fact that in the interest of encouraging a free exchange of ideas -- which is what colleges are for -- the Brown Daily Herald gave the students protesting the ad a free page of advertising to refute it, and donated the $750 the Herald received from Horowitz to the Third World Student Coalition. Moreover, the paper enlarged its space for opinion articles on the subject.

Foxman also neglected to report that some of the offended Brown students stole 4,000 copies of the edition of the Herald that had the ad in it. And student critics at the University of California at Berkeley -- home of the Free Speech Movement in 1964 -- stole copies of the Daily Californian, a campus newspaper that ran the ad. The editor of that paper, yielding to pressure, has since apologized for running this "inflammatory and inappropriate" ad.

The editor of the Harvard Crimson, which -- like any newspaper, on or off campus -- has the right to reject any ad, gave as his reason for refusing Horowitz's that it would have "aggravated" the Crimson's readers.

And in New York, the editor of the Columbia Spectator, which also rejected the ad, said "I don't think it's the newspaper's responsibility to create an atmosphere of free speech on campus. It's not our power."

But his newspaper did exercise its power to constrict campus debate on reparations.

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in New York, commented on the climate for a diversity of ideas on college campuses in a letter to The New York Times. "We say we believe in dissent, but we actually do not practice it well."

Many students react to ideas they don't like as though they were apprentice members of the Chinese Politburo. And a dismaying number of college professors and administrators remain silent as "subversive" newspapers are stolen, trashed and sometimes made into celebratory bonfires. The destruction of dissenting newspapers is in the tradition of pro-slavery mobs attacking abolitionist papers -- as demonstrated in Michael Kent Curtis's new book, "Free Speech".

At the University of Wisconsin, the independent Badger Herald printed the Horowitz ad. Its editor and reporters were confronted by crowds of yelling students accusing them of spreading "racist propaganda." The Badger Herald erred only in refusing to run an ad by the outraged Multicultural Student Coalition accusing the Badger Herald itself of chronic racism. Why not run it -- and answer it? That would have been a consistent First Amendment manifesto.

I asked John Nichols, the editorial page editor of The Capitol Times in Madison, Wis., where the Badger Herald is being besieged, whether any professors had spoken in support of the student paper's courage in wielding the Excalibur of the First Amendment.

Nichols told me he didn't know of any such brave professors. "What about the law school?" I asked. "Oh, we have some First Amendment experts there," Nichols said, "but no one said anything."

When the anti-free-speech hordes arise, too many faculty members and administrators fear being called racists or bigots. Their silent cowardice further encourages students to forget that -- as Justice William Brennan of the Supreme Court told me -- it is from the First Amendment and its spirit of free speech and a free press that all our other liberties flow. From the students of today will come the teachers, lawyers, journalists and other influential citizens of the future. That is
scary.

JWR contributor Nat Hentoff is a First Amendment authority and author of numerous books. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

03/27/01: Constitution bars school vouchers03/20/01: Torturers as trading partners03/13/01: Supreme Court rewrites Constitution03/06/01: Testing compassionate conservatism02/27/01: Are certain lives not worth living?02/20/01: Misteaching the rule of law02/13/01: What a web!02/06/01: All that jazz01/30/01: History will also judge Robert Ray01/23/01: History will not absolve him01/08/01: Will Rice remember Rwanda?01/02/01: Expanding the culture of death12/26/00: Media should stop misleading public about High Court's actions12/18/00: A government that executes children12/11/00: Caucus speaks out on slavery in Sudan12/04/00: This year, give the gift of the Constitution 11/27/00: Is capital punishment a deterrent?11/20/00: Punishing the Boy Scouts11/06/00: Joe Lieberman's excommunication10/30/00: CNN discards journalistic responsibility10/23/00: The basic flaw in the debates10/16/00: Nader's American history lesson; or: Silencing Jesse Jackson 10/06/00: Hate-crime laws: The real message10/03/00: Why Clinton was not convicted09/25/00: Protecting babies born alive09/25/00: A selective zeal for justice09/06/00: The power of nonviolence08/28/00: Should Dr. Laura be silenced?08/22/00: Trashing the Bill of Rights in Philly08/14/00: The repressive hand of China08/07/00: A racial incident on a train07/31/00: Attention Jesse Jackson: Sudanese children are still branded and enslaved07/24/00: Open up the presidential debates!07/17/00: A stealth attack on privacy07/03/00: Plea to the Congressional Black Caucus06/26/00: Burning 'bad' ideas at college06/19/00: Affirmative action beyond race06/12/00: Students discover the Constitution06/06/00: The Liar's legacy and America's delusions05/30/00: Reining in the majority's will05/23/00: Press swoons for a bunco artist05/15/00: The China that tourists don't see05/08/00: The coverage of Reno's lawless raid05/01/00: In Clinton and Castro's best interests 04/24/00: Elian's human rights04/17/00: Crime's down, but arrests keep rising04/10/00: Teacher brings Constitution to life04/03/00: The Americans who keep disappearing03/27/00: The censoring of feminist history03/20/00: Should there be a chaplain in Congress?03/13/00: Big labor, big China, spinning Gore03/03/00: The ACLU violates its principles --- yet again!02/28/00: Still two nations?02/11/00: You bet we should disbar Bubba01/31/00: Where was Jesse?01/24/00: Is suing church for sexual harassment an entanglement?01/18/00: Will Miranda make it?01/11/00: ACLU: Guilty until presumed innocent?01/03/00: Liberty lion should be Man of Century12/28/99: Drug tests that tear families apart12/20/99: Get ready for decisive ruling on school vouchers for religious schools12/13/99: Guess who is taking the lead in anti-slavery movement? Hint: It ain't Rev. Jesse12/06/99: When we refuse to buy the 'otherly-challenged' excuse11/29/99: Expelling 'Huck Finn' 11/22/99: Pleading the First11/16/99: Goal of diversity needs rethinking?11/08/99: Prosecution in darkness11/02/99: The accuracy that's owed to readers10/26/99: Disappeared Americans10/18/99: The blue wall of silence10/11/99: Bill Bradley's speech tax10/04/99: 'Technicalities' that keep us free09/27/99: Our 'Americanism'-ignorant generation 09/20/99: ACLU better clean up its act09/13/99: A professor of infanticide at Princeton09/07/99: The Big Apple's Rotten Policing08/23/99: Lawyerly ethics08/16/99: To Get a Supreme Court Seat08/02/99: What are the poor people doing tonight?07/26/99: Lady Hillary and the press